The Iron Grail

by Robert Holdstock

  ‘That celebration is a distant memory,’ Tisaminas said with a wan smile. ‘But I did enjoy it. I raised a cup to you. I didn’t understand why.’

  ‘We are shaping the past. It’s easier than shaping the future. Your shade was aware, even if you weren’t.’

  ‘The consequences, though…’

  ‘Leave them to me. I play a very good game of consequences.’

  He seemed relieved to hear my words.

  * * *

  That night, five spectral figures slipped past the guard at the rear gate. Tall men in long cloaks, their hair loose, carrying only sword and scabbard, they sought me out. I recognised the man who dreamed himself Pendragon. His eyes caught the silver of the moon as he greeted me quietly. For a moment, again, I thought I was looking at a reflection of Urtha.

  ‘This has been a wonderful day,’ he said to me. ‘The Sea Prophecy has come true. The Old Ship came.’

  ‘The Sea Prophecy?’

  ‘One of the Five Uncertain Prophecies made by a man called Sciamath, an enchanter, now lost to us.’

  Sciamath again, the man whose cloak was a whirling flow of forests, a seer of ancient days. An enigmatic figure who clearly worked his visions in the Otherworld as well as in the territory of kings. I had not known he was lost.

  ‘The prophecy?’

  ‘That an Old Ship with a crew of ghosts would release us to pursue our dreams again. We have been slaves to the Dead for too long. The siege of this place is ended. This is our moment! This is goodbye, Merlin. I had thought we could investigate the world together, but the time is not right. On the other side of that winding river there will now be a reckoning, of no concern to you. I will see you on another day!’

  The five warlords, the five Unborn kings, held their richly patterned scabbards towards me in salute, then turned and slipped from the fortress, silent and unseen, to take war across the river.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Light of Foresight

  A squad of men, armed with Ullanna’s contrived charm-sticks, had gone out on to MaegCatha Plain, beating the grass and brush in the manner of children beating to disturb wild fowl and woodcocks for the waiting archers. Nothing on the plain that was now in hiding, and might be induced to fly for freedom, would be edible, however.

  Still mindful of Jason’s last bitter words to me, as he had lain ‘mortally’ wounded by his own eldest son in the shadow of the oracle of Dodona, I went in search of the man, to confront him on the matter of his own trickery. The guard at the king’s enclosure recognised me and allowed me past, but I entered a long house that was barren of any life save the fire and its tenders, the two hounds which were catching up with sleep, though each raised a languorous head to study me as I came into the place, and the Ligurian argonaut, who was sick and curled up on a low bench.

  ‘Where’s Jason?’ I asked the man. Smoke swirled in the main room, and light picked out the details of shields and weapons, scattered around, ready for use. Gold filigree flashed from several of the banners hanging from the rafters.

  ‘Looking for son. Looking for stinking sorcerer bastard who know son,’ the sick man grunted before pulling his cloak over his head.

  Looking for me, then.

  But I ignored the gesture of reconciliation in the Argonaut’s voice. I could have prowled for him as the hound, or scanned with an eagle’s eye from the low cloud above the hill, but I had a strong feeling that the old Greeklander was close; and sure enough, as I entered the antechamber from Urtha’s main hall, stepping into the claustrophobic gloom of the place where shields and spears were stored, I felt the prick of a knife below my right ear, a point painfully made.

  ‘Where’s Little Dreamer?’ was Jason’s question. The knife point was as insistent as Niiv’s groping, and as futile.

  ‘Somewhere in this land,’ I replied.

  ‘I know he’s somewhere in this land. “Between sea-swept walls, where he rules but doesn’t know it.” The words of the oracle at Arkamon. I haven’t forgotten.’

  ‘This is the land between sea-swept walls. The island of Alba.’

  ‘Island? It goes on for ever. This is no gods-protected island! I’ve been sailing its rivers for moon after moon. I’ll never find the boy unless I can narrow down the search.’

  He used the blade like an oyster knife, turning it as if he could prise open the bone below my ear. I paraphrased the words of Achilles, when surprised unarmed by his mortal enemy Hector as he made an offering to Athene in a grove outside Troy. Feeling the prick of the sword against his spine he had said, ‘Push in the blade or sheathe it. I don’t negotiate with metal, only men with metal.’

  Hector was subdued, and later that day died by Achilles’ own sunblessed hand.

  Jason laughed at my small conceit. ‘The very words Daedalus used to King Minos, when his first maze had failed to hold his half-creature son, the Minotaur, and the king was about to kill him. You know your history!’

  Daedalus? Perhaps I’d been misinformed.

  But I ignored the gesture of reconciliation in the argonaut’s voice. The blade still hurt, and my blood still beat furiously with the thought of Tisaminas, shade-dragged and vacant because of the mercenary whim of this once-great man.

  ‘Where have you hidden the kolossoi?’

  He grabbed me by the shoulder and flung me round. He looked old and hard, angry and dead at the same time. A rank odour seeped from his mouth and there was that liquid look to his eyes, which might have been illness or the imminence of old age. His hair, loose and grey, hung like an oily blanket around a weathered face that might have been carved from stone.

  ‘Never mind the kolossoi! Kinos is all that matters. His bitch-mother has hidden him here. I haven’t the years to scour every damp valley and every stinking marsh for the lad. But you, you, Antiokus, you are the key! I know you know where he is. You are too meddlesome not to have found out. Where is he?’

  ‘Where are the kolossoi?’

  ‘Why?’ he screamed at me. ‘Why? What in the name of the gods does it matter about such tokens?’

  ‘It matters to me. It matters to Tisaminas and the others.’

  ‘They are dead. They have no understanding. Once they mattered. Now, they don’t matter at all! Except that they’re strong.’

  ‘They matter to me.’

  ‘They’re out of Elysia, they’ll return to Elysia.’

  ‘They’re hurting.’

  A rage engulfed the old man. His fist slammed into my cheek and my knees buckled as my head spun from the blow. He shouted, ‘No!’ as he struck me. I never let my gaze leave his. He did not want to confront the truth of what I had told him. He kept his hands on my jacket, hauling me back to my feet. I was as dizzy with the foul miasma from his lungs as with the addling of my senses from the pugnacious response to my insistent questions.

  I could have ended this so quickly, but this man had once been my friend. I wondered, even as he leered at me, whether a demon was riding on his shoulders. Nothing was visible; madness ruled the day.

  ‘Is he here?’ Jason breathed, his teeth bared. ‘Kinos! The boy who could dream for all of Greek Land. Is he here? Tell me, you bastard! Tell me and I’ll never trouble you again.’

  ‘Where are the kolossoi?’

  ‘Forget the fucking kolossoi! Antiokus … I know you too well; I know you will have found the scent of the boy! Just tell me where he is and you can go away, settle down in a small meadow, grow belladonna and beans and every midwinter go into a trance and fart your way to the stars! It’s a simple thing I ask. I no longer want to kill you. I did then, I don’t now. It’s a simple thing I ask. Kinos! Where did that bitch hide him? Kinos. Simple question. Simple answer. Leave the rest to me.’

  ‘Kolossoi.’

  He clearly didn’t understand. ‘Why?’ he breathed in exasperation. ‘What is so important? They died seven hundred years ago. I’m just using them to row the ship. It’s a big ship. I need strong arms on the oars. I don’t intend to keep them around. They
were my friends, they are the only friends I’ve got! I’m not disturbing them, Antiokus—’

  ‘But you are!’

  ‘How? They’ve been in their graves for seven centuries.’

  ‘They are alive. The kolossoi take from their life. Seven centuries ago, these men—Atalanta too—are the living dead.’

  He tried to wrap his thoughts around the statement. Shaking his head, he said only, ‘What was done then is done.’

  ‘Not at all. Your actions now can easily affect the lives of your six resurrected dead in their living past. How they will be remembered depends on when you give back the kolossoi. You had no right to use them; they were intended for use in your argonauts’ lifetimes. Once they were dead, you should have cast them away.’

  He smoothed my clothing, looked thoughtful. ‘I wasn’t aware you knew so much about our little tokens.’

  ‘Your little tokens have been the stock in trade of sorcerers for ten thousand years. Under different names, and in different forms, but of course I know about the Gift of the Greeklanders! Where have you hidden them?’

  ‘Where is Kinos hiding?’

  I could hear the approach of men along the path that led to the king’s house. One of the women, tending the fire, had gone for help at the sound of raised voices.

  I decided to let Jason know how close he had been to his son. I told him that he had been within slingshot range of the boy who was now a man. I told him that he had exchanged blows with him.

  ‘Blows? When?’

  ‘When you crossed the river. The horseman who tried to kill you.’

  You are not the one. You are not the one.

  Jason was taken by surprise. ‘That aggressive bastard could not have been Kinos. He would have recognised me. I always wore a beard … the grey in the beard would not have stopped him recognising me.’

  ‘He remembers you differently. He is a grown man. Your other son was a grown man. What sort of reception did you get from him? Ask the flesh of your belly! Don’t expect a welcome feast until he is sure of who you are.’

  My words affected Jason, a moment of concern, the lines around his eyes crowding together. Even so, he whispered, ‘You do know where he is…’

  Behind him, Urtha and Manandoun entered the gloomy room, hands resting purposefully on the decorated ivory hilts of their swords. Manandoun asked sharply, ‘Can we help?’

  ‘Thank you. No.’

  Urtha reminded Jason of what he had said the night before. ‘I will not have a contest between you at the moment. You are both guests in my house.’

  ‘There is no contest,’ Jason said, then turned and bowed his head to the king. ‘I have just learned that I have seen my son without recognising him; and that he saw me without recognising his father. I have just learned that Merlin can help me, and I plead for that help; I pledge no hostility while I am in your fort.’

  ‘Except to the enemy, I hope,’ Urtha suggested.

  The two men turned and left us. Jason’s face, again creased with thought, caught the light from the door as it was opened and closed, a brief glance towards me. ‘I don’t know where the kolossoi are to be found. I lost them as soon as Argo came along this river. Ask the ship. She’s more a friend of yours than she is of mine.’

  If I could have sucked the truth from the sap of his brain, I’d have done so, there and then. But Jason was closed to me. He always had been. Besides, something in his manner suggested he was not lying.

  * * *

  A kolossoi is both a simple and a complex thing; an object; magical and personal, each one quite unique since each one is constructed out of the life and dreams of the man or woman who offers it as the token of help to a friend or brother or parent or son.

  In the Northlands they call them sampaa. In the hill country beyond Colchis, they are korkonu. In many countries their power has been misunderstood and they have, and had, become simple objects, amulets and talismans: trinkets, sparkles, dew drops on the meadow, nothing more.

  In the long-gone, in the murk and magic of the forested, formidable world into which I was born, I had known them by a name, but since the name itself has power, I cannot write it, even mark it, even sign it.

  My own ancient ‘kolossoi’ is well hidden. Not even Medea will find it.

  The kolossoi of these old Achaeans, Greeklanders, call them what you will, were hideous, portable, and almost hypnotic if looked at for too long. I doubt that Jason had even glanced at them when he had dug them up from where he’d hidden them. He would have used the shield trick, made famous by Perseus in his encounter with the mother Gorgon, Medusa, whose direct look at a man could literally petrify him. The shield would have been of polished bronze or silver in which he would have viewed the reflection of the artefacts he sought as he reached for them, a simple diversion of light that would have sapped the power of the objects for a moment, long enough for him to cover them in a leather bag; or box them; or conceal them under a cloak if they were large and beginning to grow after having been disturbed. And some kolossoi were indeed colossal.

  Those of Jason’s friends would have been of the smaller kind.

  I had an idea of what had happened to them, but Argo, if Mielikki would let me pass into the Spirit of the Ship, would certainly be able to tell me. Though that certainty, of course, was not a reason to believe that she would divulge the hiding place.

  * * *

  Argo had hidden below the Thunder Hill, somewhere along the intricate channels of the river, Nantosuelta, which coursed through Taurovinda in a series of helical veins, much as the blood, I believe, flows through the limbs and bellies of men: controlled and urgent. The hill was a world of its own, opened by shafts from the surface, seething with a spiralling network of water coming up from below.

  The most obvious place to descend and find the ship was through the well dedicated to Nodons, close to the western gate.

  A stone maze, the height of a tall man, protected the well, though its centre could be seen from the higher fortifications. This was protective not so much against men as against the supernatural. The maze around Nodon’s Well was simple, a winding double track, no blind ends, and somehow I still got lost.

  When I reached the pool, below its thatched and flowered roof, the three women who drew from it were hardly able to suppress their laughter. They each had a tree under which they sat: a blackthorn, a rowan, an aspen.

  ‘Have you come to drink, wash or watch?’ blackthorn asked me. By watch she meant ask for a favour from Nodons, which would mean the depositing of an offering into the deep well.

  ‘To descend,’ I said. ‘And without interference from you, if you don’t mind.’

  They looked at me blankly, then with amusement tempered with surprise as I stripped, piling my clothing neatly in a niche in the stone wall.

  I slipped into the pool, arms above my head, and let the tug of the earth draw me down. I summoned silvering, the spirit of the fish. My chest ceased to ache, my vision cleared, if water entered my lungs I was not aware of it. I could hold this state for half the morning before the urgency of the human flesh would drive me to seek air again.

  The well descended, then levelled out, rising again through the earth, water caught between sharp rock walls; then it plunged again and soon I felt the powerful grip of Nantosuelta drawing me into her arms. This was another maze, a water maze; I swam through the hill, deeper and deeper, pushing against the rocky tunnels, squeezing through crevices hardly wide enough for a fish, let alone a large-limbed man. Sometimes bent double to follow the flow, sometimes plunged into a wide underground chamber, at last I slipped across slimy, smooth rocks into the river herself.

  Light here was dimly phosphorescent, a green and yellow glow from the walls and roof. The hill above this place rumbled and moaned, shuddered and breathed, as if it were a beast, slumbering unhappily.

  Everywhere there were signs of the connection between Taurovinda and the Sun Bull, from dried dung, voluminous and rock hard, to the scattered skulls and horn
s of smaller representations of the beast. Every outcrop of phosphorescent rock in this underground river system seemed to be the calcified head of such a creature.

  More numerous were the boats, the small boats which had carried the honoured dead from the hill to the river over so many centuries. They lay on the rocks, or drifted sluggishly in the flow, tethered by leather cords. They were empty, of course, and some were very rotten, though they spoke of many ages in the carvings and tracings on their simple hulls.

  In the world above, rites and ceremonies were played out month after month in the groves, sanctuaries and sacred ways, while everywhere else life went on as normal, with due acknowledgement to the secret language of the underworld. I wonder how surprised those priests and kings would have been to know what vestiges of their ceremonies were accumulating below their foundations.

  It would not have happened in any other fortress. I had now seen all I needed to see to grasp the greater significance of Taurovinda.

  But where was Argo? She would be moored somewhere in these caverns.

  I could do worse than call for her, it seemed to me, so call for her I did, and after a while she answered. I slipped and slid along the rocks until, gently illuminated in the strange phosphorescence, I saw her prow.

  Mielikki watched me sternly as I climbed into her hull and went to crouch below the figurehead, naked, shivering, hoping that Argo would open her spirit to me.

  * * *

  A gust of warm summer air; a lynx peered at me, then turned and bounded away towards a thin stand of trees, aspens, shaking in the breeze. I crossed the threshold, stepping into the summer landscape. Mielikki sat close by on a rocky outcrop, dressed in a thin, white dress, youthful and pleasant to look at, except for her eyes, which narrowed at their edges in that way the Northlanders call pookish.

  ‘Thank you for returning the little boat,’ she said. ‘Argo is glad to have her back. A wound has been healed.’

  ‘That little boat has been my friend and my comfort. I know it left a wound in the great ship. I’m grateful for the loan. I would like to thank Argo herself.’